You could have heard a pin drop. (At least, up until the near-final moments, when a few rogue cellphones rang out and then were quickly, embarrassedly silenced.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For over ninety minutes last night, Vikingur Olafsson held his Carnegie Hall<\/a> audience spellbound with an uninterrupted series of beautiful rendered Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven. I have been listening to this great Icelandic pianist in recordings for two or three years now, so I knew to expect something good. But I had no idea how<\/em> good. I don\u2019t just mean the way he played the notes, though that too was gripping\u2014especially, I thought, in Bach\u2019s long and thrilling Partita No. 6 in E Minor, which formed the centerpiece of the program. Others in my party favored instead the Beethoven Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109, with which the concert concluded\u2014and I have to admit that was a rare treat, too. But what really made the whole evening so great was the thought that went into the construction of the program, combined with the unnerving, almost other-worldly concentration with which it was played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven: that was the whole recipe, and yet it seemed to cover a huge swath of music, at the same time as it all seemed intimately interrelated. We began with a mere snippet of Bach, the Prelude No. 9 in E Major, and then went straight into Beethoven\u2019s rousing Piano Sonata No. 27. (If you notice the prevalence of the key of E in this program, that was purposeful: Olafsson himself, in his elegant and expressive program note, pointed out that his synesthesia causes him to picture the pitch of E in some kind of green color, so he composed the whole program in various shades of green.) After the Beethoven, without pause, came the central and essential Bach Partita, followed immediately by Schubert\u2019s Piano Sonata in E Minor from 1817. This led seamlessly into the Beethoven Op. 109, composed only three years later than the Schubert, but so different in manner and tone that we seemed to have stepped both forward into the twentieth century and backward into Bach\u2019s eighteenth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By the end of the evening, Olafsson had made his case thoroughly, illustrating how clearly these works connected to each other even as he subtly displayed their differences. The roar that met him at the conclusion, after that prolonged stillness and silence, was only the surface indication of how delighted and amazed we all were. And he responded to our enthusiasm with an almost boyish warmth, not only speaking to us directly, but also generously giving us three encores\u2014one from Bach (the \u201cAir in G\u201d in his own arrangement, dedicated to the hundred-year-old Gyorgy Kurtag) and two from Rameau. It was certainly an evening to remember.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You could have heard a pin drop. (At least, up until the near-final moments, when a few rogue cellphones rang out and then were quickly, embarrassedly silenced.) For over ninety minutes last night, Vikingur Olafsson held his Carnegie Hall audience … Continue reading